


Snapshot

by inK_AddicTion



Series: Age of Rust [6]
Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Age of Rust, Bigotry & Prejudice, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Rape/Non-con Elements, goddamn okay most of this is unhealthy in some way just use your own judgement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-08-30 14:56:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 17
Words: 12,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8537440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inK_AddicTion/pseuds/inK_AddicTion
Summary: Drabbles written for a variety of prompts transferred from my tumblr.





	1. Shut up, I'm a delight!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wild Queens.

“It’s my turn to host the Guardian meet-up, and we’re going to have to lay down some house rule- Seraphina, are you even listening?”

Tooth hands on hips, hovered high enough in the air that theoretically, she should be at Seraphina’s direct eye height. And yet, Sera had a way of looking down the bridge of her nose that always made Tooth feel somewhat like a tiny, screeching parakeet instead of the fearsome Sister of Flight that she was.

“No.”

At least she was honest. Sprawled nonchalantly over two human sized couches, Sera’s hair had transformed half the room into an animate kelp forest of writhing, windswept tendrils. Butterflies and birdsong drifted out from the mass. One eye was closed to allow a napping beetle to perch there, and the other was half-lidded, lambent. She stuck out her tongue and a worm slithered down her chin.

“Seraphina.” Tooth was in despair. The Guardians were all aware of their relationship, but the last time they’d all seen her had been some thousands of years ago when the Tooth Palace had still been called Punjam Hy Loo, and poor Jack had never met her at all. “Please take this seriously - I want them to like you.”

“I want them to fear me,” said Sera flatly, idly kicking a lounging leopard off the arm of the couch so she could rest her stained brown feet on it. Her toes, more fingers than toes, flexed. “And love me. And do as I say.” She grinned, suddenly, and Tooth huffed.

“Quoting that fucking movie has to stop or I swear by the moon that I will leave you and never come back,” Tooth threatened. As ever, her threat washed blindly over Seraphina with all the effect of a pebble in the face of an avalanche.

“Ooh, the Tooth Fairy swears,” Sera teased. At Tooth’s death-glare, she shrugged lazily and continued, “I like the fluffy human. He reminds me of an uncle I had once. Before Father ate him, that is.”

“Pitch Black has some weird habits,” Tooth agreed, flitting down to perch on one of Sera’s raised knees. Her feet dangled down and rested on Sera’s warm stomach. One of Sera’s hands carefully closed around her ankle, petting her feathers. Tooth sighed.

“This is going to be a disaster,” she lamented. “They’re going to end up trying to stage another intervention.”

“There’s nowhere on Earth that they can hide from me,” Sera asserted confidently, “Don’t worry, little bird. They’ll love me.”

Tooth looked at her dubiously. Just as she finished speaking, an odd expression crossed Sera’s face and she leaned over to cough. There was a strained moment, and then Sera hacked up a small pile of bones, one of which looked suspiciously similar to a human’s.

Tooth stared at the vile mess and swore she felt her feathers deflate at the idea of cleaning it up.

“Sorry,” said Sera, with a complete lack of remorse. “I ate a child on the way here.”

“That’s EXACTLY the sort of thing you can’t say to THE GUARDIANS OF CHILDHOOD, Seraphina! How will they know you’re joking?? And that’s disgusting!”

Picking at her teeth with her hangnail, Sera retorted in a somewhat muffled voice, “Shut up, I’m a fucking delight.”


	2. med-school

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Modern human AU featuring Orion the Hunter and Apollo Lunanoff.

“Med school?” Orion stared at him, half-chewed lumps of sandwich sliding out of his mouth. His scrabbly beard was half-shaven, again, and his eyes were bloodshot and bleary. He looked like a mess.

Apollo winced politely and averted his eyes, fidgeting with the cuffs of his shirt with his trembling fingers. Stress always amplified the nerve damage, made him shake more until he looked like he was on the edge of a fit.

“Yes,” he said, faintly. He cleared his throat and tried again, hating the sound of his voice, smoke-torn and raspy, forever ruined in the same horrific studio accident that had destroyed his dreams of becoming an artist. Held safe in his lap, his hands jittered.

“You think you can handle that?” Orion asked, dubiously, chasing the bite of sandwich with a swig of water and a loud belch. “I mean, you’ve gotta be pretty smart, don’t you? And - man, your major was art.”

“I’m not stupid,” said Apollo, fiercely, more fiercely than he felt. “Maybe I can learn how to make this better-”

“Look, man,” said Orion, cutting him off and silencing him immediately, “I’m glad that you’ve decided to stop freeloading off me and like, do something with your life, but you’re an idiot. I’ve met smarter sandwiches than you. And you’re all - fucked in the head, dude. What if they ask you to go in a dark room? You gonna shake and cry? Or start a fire with one of them burners? You gonna freeze up like you normally do?” He shook his head. “I’m tryna be nice. Forget it, yeah? I’ll find you a job down co'op or something.”

Unclenching his fists, Apollo looked down at his hands and sighed. “You’re right,” he said, quietly, and that was that.


	3. the trouble with possessive boyfriends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> past!Kozmotis/Apollo/Orion. Modern human AU.

“It’s 8:30, I have a hangover, and you’re annoying me. Fuck off before I hit you. Again. Won’t get you an icepack this time, either. Asshole.”

A grunt. Icepack held to one eye. The other, dark and swollen, meeting his.

Koz stuffed his hands into his pockets, shivered against the cold, and tried to look antagonistic as his breath plumed around him and snowflakes dusted his dark coat.

They said it was suicide. Nothing they could have done, either of them. No use fighting now.

It was the only normal thing left. And if the pounding in Koz’s head wasn’t quite from the stupor he’d drunk himself into last night he sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it to Orion.

“Send me ‘way then,” Orion said, flatly, and Koz stared down at the crunched snow beneath his boots, fragments of fresh turned earth still visible.

He did nothing. Eventually, it was Orion that got up, dropping the icepack on the ground. He hesitated, and then reached out and patted Apollo’s gravestone, saying goodbye.

As he left, his shoulder smacked into Koz’s and sent him stumbling.

“Asshole,” Koz repeated to the swirling snow. “You really knew how to pick us, didn’t you?”

He thumbed off his glove and patted the gravestone.

If they couldn’t share him, neither of them got to have Apollo. At least they agreed on one thing - they both couldn’t bear to see him with the other.

It hadn’t been a suicide.


	4. rainfall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seraphina enjoys the rain.

There’s a peace in the quiet, matter-of-fact noise of rainfall. She sits, toughened brown legs curled up around her, flexible toes sinking into the wet, lush moss, and tilts her head up to the sky.  
It is heaving, thick grey clouds sighing, portentous and ponderous, a cascading rain of slightly stinging droplets. Her skin has never quite liked the higher salt content of water on this world, but over time it has thickened until she barely feels it.  
Her black hair for once is subdued, hanging limp and long and dark in straight lines down her back, sticking to her face in long, creeping spider-leg tendrils. She closes her eyes, lets her mind drift in and out of all the little scurrying, scuttling creatures around her, their lives tiny beacons in a world of darkness.  
Rainfall isn’t a time for thinking. It’s just a time to be, to exist, to live in the basest, rawest sense of herself.  
Sometimes, Seraphina is thankful for that.


	5. blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Toothiana, the post-battle rush is sometimes difficult to defuse.

Blood - hot. Like bile. It has never been her preferred taste. She likes nectar, fresh-welled from the goddess’ cupped palms. But still, times are rough and Toothiana is rougher.  
Scars - ranks of patchy feathers, some quills lumpy and red with infection. A dullness to her wings. The bone edges through, sharp as a scythe. Dried blood cakes it.  
She hasn’t stopped thrumming yet. Battlelust thick in her throat like the pound of war drums. The heaviness of her sword hilts in her hands, clutched so tightly it cuts grooves into her flesh.  
There is a ring of teeth around her neck, polished, shining relics. The box has been destroyed. There are more teeth scattered at her feet, wet with blood and red with gum still.  
“Tooth.” Heavy voice, thick voice. She whirls around with a hiss, wings flared and head cocked. Her swords lift into a defensive stance.  
Protect the teeth.  
“Tooth,” says Nicholas, again. “Tooth.”  
She recognises him and the fight dulls to a low roar in her eardrums. Fidgeting, she lets him close to help her clean the blood out of her feathers.  
There are some battle wounds, after all, that can only be soothed when someone else comes to help.


	6. craving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kozmotis Pitchiner/Sanderson Mansnoozie. Probably takes place in ksclaw's Eldritch Abomination AU

“Will I see you tomorrow?” asks Koz, a little desperately - his lips are still aching from that blistering stardust kiss, and his hands are burnt raw from sandburn, but he still clamours up at the railing for a last lingering kiss.  
‘Probably not,’ says Sandy, as gently as he can, but Koz flinches anyway. So breakable, Sandy reminds himself. 'I have no concept of your human time.’  
“Oh,” says Koz, and blinks rapidly. “Come… Come back soon, will you?”  
Sandy tilts his head, rippling pennants of gold ever moving. 'Love those around you and don’t yearn for the one who is not,’ he advises, wisely, then dips back for Koz’s last kiss.  
Around them, the towering pile of corpses from the people’s dreams Sandy’s hunger has consumed slowly rotted away in the midday sun.


	7. afterwards

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ksclaw's eldritch abomination AU, in which Kozmotis Pitchiner has become an eldritch being and his wife has unfortunately died. The Lunanoffs struggle to cope.

“I’m alive,” Apollo whined, “I can tell because of the pain.”

Dramatically, he clawed at the ruffled front of his shirt, swaying on his feet, and exposed an absolutely tiny little scratch on his pectoral that Selena had given him by accident this morning, when one of her sharp nails caught on his skin as he “jokingly” swung her off her feet.

Most times her dancing kicked in and she landed lightly, en pointe, other times she was too exhausted to react fast enough and they both went down like a tonne of bricks.

She hadn’t slept last night. Apollo hadn’t either, for all she knew - he’d stumbled in reeking of sweat and sex sometime around three in the morning, and slumped over beside her, pupils so dilated that she’d momentarily thought his entire eye had gone black. She’d checked his pulse, got him as comfortable as she could, and then went to curl up on the couch. Apollo in withdrawal was never particularly fun. He did that more frequently than ever, nowadays, since the Pitchiners. Getting utterly wasted was easier than thinking about what they’d lost, she supposed.

Selena gave him a dour look. “Don’t be so ridiculous,” she snapped, “This is a serious occasion.”

They were auctioning off the house today.

She was fixing her hair back into tight braid, so tight it looked like it was going to rip the hair out of her head at any moment. Apollo was purportedly ‘helping’ by carefully weaving in tiny silvery shells, but he evidently preferred to make a nuisance of himself instead.

“It does hurt,” he insisted, in a theatrical voice. “Genuinely.” He stole her hand as it reached for a hair pin and pressed it to his chest, his hand solid and warm over hers. “Can’t you feel my pain?”

“I feel you,” she snapped back, and he smirked, looking self-satisfied, having accomplished his goal.

Yes, she felt him. Solid. Alive. Real. And certainly not the dead ghost they had both loved in their own way who hadn’t quite given up on punishing the both of them for a crime neither of them had actually committed. She would have loved him for his attempts to ground her on danger days like these, if only he wasn’t so obnoxious about it.

She frowned. She could feel his ribs through his shirt, and his hand over hers was jittering again, convulsive, involuntary tremors that made him jerk about like a flag on a windy day.

“What have you had to eat today?” she asked.

He grinned impishly at her. “Your chambermaid.”

“Crass,” she commented, lip curled, but too inured to his vile jokes to find it shocking enough to disarm her, as he’d probably hoped. “Go eat a proper breakfast, Apollo, if you pass out again I’m not carrying you away. I shall leave you there to be molested by the old women.”

“What an excellently caring wife you are,” he muttered. “If you passed out, I’d carry you to safety.”

“You have the strength of a feeble stick insect, you couldn’t lift me if you tried. Go, eat.”

Grumbling, he sloped off. He liked to pretend he didn’t have human needs most of the time. Perhaps taking refuge in the part of him that wasn’t helped. Selena didn’t know. She rigidly suppressed anything inhuman in herself.

Leaning closer to the mirror, she began to apply a layer of makeup, just to dab away the dark circles under her eyes, the ugly paleness from her curse, to hide the stress lines forming around her forehead and mouth, premature wrinkled grooves in her skin. She tutted at the colourlessness of her eyes. She’d been unable to corral in the curse strongly enough to keep any colour in her face since the …accident.

She popped in blue contact lenses, and looked up to check that they didn’t look too obviously unnatural.

The face that stared back, eyes graven and hollow, skin whiteish with death and bloated with the beginning of rot, was not hers. Her smile was lined with crumbling tombstone teeth and her skull, caved in, oozed cold brains down the side of her neck.

The ghost sighed like the howl of wind through leafless branches, inescapably, utterly disappointed, and shook her smashed in head on her snapped and twisted neck.

Selena flinched, and her hand flying up to protect herself and accidentally sweeping the bottles of makeup off the vanity with a thunderous crash.

“Leave me alone!” Selena shrieked and the rage lit her up brilliant white. For half a second she scrabbled against the curse for sanity, but in the next, she had lost it, and she was gone, swallowed in blood and light and madness and rage.

She came to kneeling on the floor, shards of glass crunching under her knees. Blood, white blood, ran slowly down her forearms in thick, turgid splats from where the glass had cut, and makeup stained the dress she wore with irregular blotches of red and cream, like the spread of rot over black skin.

Apollo had his arm around her. She thought maybe she was shaking, maybe she was laughing.

“Are you trying to drive me mad?!” she shrieked to nothingness, and Apollo held her, did nothing but hold her, the fires that burned in his gut a steady, reassuring warmth.

There was no response. It was always this way. An appearance, wordless disappointment, and then vanishing.

“What did I do?” she begged Apollo, “what did I do wrong?”

He kissed her forehead and held her. “When you figure it out, tell me too, why don’t you?” he murmured, and he was staring at the dark space under the vanity, where two gold eyes might be seen, staring back.

She laughed at that, helplessly, and he kissed her, and said with an obnoxiousness so familiar she was almost glad to hear it, “Come now, Selena, don’t be ridiculous, this is a serious occasion.”


	8. drunk on stardust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cold Gold.

There is golddust on his hands and on his lips, and ice fronds melting off Sandy’s cheeks. The mermaids run webbed fingers through his damp hair, water gurgles up to his chest and he should be frightened but all he can see is stars.

Their vivid dance turns trailing nebulae in the sky. Sandy’s edges are hemmed in by lead and rubbed raw with burnished copper gold. He tastes like starlight, if it has a taste, and cooked chestnuts if it does not. Autumn crunches and crisps when Jack turns, leaves spinning and spiralling painted red and gold, red and gold, red and gold.

‘Are you drunk?’ Sandy asks, kindly, and Jack maybe nods but he can’t feel his face and his body has gone numb. He can still feel the leaves though.

Sandy has even formed swollen freckles that look like trees over his back for the leaves to roost in when they are tired and don’t want to play anymore.

Sandy curls around him, the whole island that is Sandy, and the mermaids laugh and pull Jack’s fingers until the bones click. He lets Jack play on his shores until Jack is drunk and half dead under the weight of the dreamdust like water in his mouth, and then the curling fronds of his sand ripple under Jack’s feet and urge him to one of Sandy’s great palms, where a clamshell bigger than North rests sweetly.

Jack gets in. He is drunk, seeing spinning stars, insensate.

Sandy puts him at the cold darkness of the ocean floor to sober up.


	9. dreamspider

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spawned from a message sent to a friend on tumblr and written well over a year ago. Rape, infanticide, murder.

_But don’t you see it? All those long strands of sand, like silk, curling around the sleeping, unwary minds of dreamers –_ watch yourself, _that you don’t sleep too long, else he’ll come and steal away your mind, wrap you tight in a cocoon of glittering sand, just another trapped little fly in the spider’s web. But this is no spider, not truly, and a star does not_ bite _the heads of his prey like some animal, no, instead he drains you, slowly, one pinprick of imagination and dreams and wishes and sanity and_ you _at a time, until there’s nothing left of you but a single grain of bright golden sand. You won’t mind, at_   _that point. The first things he takes from you are your dreams of being free._

Pitch Black stalks through the night. He is confident and assured, the night is perfect, deep, endless and dark, the high pinpricks of the stars overhead like watching eyes concealed by smoke. He pauses at the thought, and for half a moment his sleek visage cracks into a frown.

_Watching eyes._

He is being ridiculous, he thinks. He is hungry, though. Always hungry, as if he is feeding some other great beast crouching inside, shadows pressing slickly against his skin. He is so-very-hungry…

Why is he so hungry?

It is nighttime, the sun never rises. He wonders if he has ever seen the sun. He is certain he has, but try as he might all he can think of is bright gold.

He is hungry though, gliding between the shadows sliding haphazard over street corners, under the yellow glow of streetlamps. Smoke plumes from factory stacks like a beast yawning, flashes of teeth in the smog. Something, smiling, looking down at him.

He walks into a child’s bedroom. She has brown hair, snub nose, freckles. There is a pink unicorn on her pillow.

“What an adorable dream,” says Pitch. He raises a hand, watches it move hazily, dreamlike. He pauses. His skin is smooth-looking, translucent like reproduced paper. He clenches his fist, realises he is unable to feel his body at all.

His sight flickers.

Pitch Black walks through a rainy street, the tall columns of a shuttered factory rising overhead. The sky is clouded, petrichor heavy tasting on his tongue. An abandoned car shrieks a car alarm into the white silence, and pursing his lips in irritation, Pitch Black walks into a child’s bedroom. The little girl’s brown hair splays over the pillow boldly.

He moves closer. “What an adorable dream,” says Pitch. His voice comes out strange. He frowns. It sounds like it is coming from the lamp nearby. The lamp is gold, and is painted with watching eyes.

He blinks.

His steps are measured, soundless on the dew-splattered pavement. A car alarm wails somewhere, forgotten. It’s dark, of course it is. The dark is what Pitch loves, isn’t it? He slides through a shadow, emerges in a bedroom decorated entirely in pink. He sneers. There are unicorn posters on the walls.

The dreamer is curled up, peacefully asleep. A horse dances over her head- no, a unicorn, like the one on her pillow.

There isn’t a unicorn on her pillow, there is a rhinoceros. He shakes his head. He must be going mad.

Hallucinating about children’s toys, now?

Pitch Black walks through the dark street. It seems familiar, somehow, the blare of the car alarm the only sound. He thinks maybe he will go somewhere else, after he has finished here. Try as he might, he can’t remember any world outside this rainy, quiet, shuttered street, the little girl’s bedroom, all hemmed in by factory stacks and smoke.

He blinks. He looks up, and somehow sees the Moon in a starless sky. The Moon stares back helplessly.

_Help me,_ says the Moon, and Pitch’s mouth moves but no sound comes out.

“What an adorable dream,” he says, like a broken tape recorder. “What an adorable dream. What an adorable dream. What an adorable-” His throat swells, choking off his words, and frantically he struggles for a moment. His sight rapidly darkens at the edges.

The stars glitter like eyes overhead.

The girl is sleeping, a dream of unicorns dancing around her head. He is sick of horses. His hand flickers like paper as he reaches down, and he can’t feel his body.

“What an adorable dream,” he says. He has heard it before. He has said that every night for his entire existence.

It is damp outside. Somewhere, unheard, he knows a car alarm will be blaring. Factory stacks will be rising out of the gloom. He knows this. How does he know this? The same way he knows he is hungry.

He is trapped.

Is his name even Pitch Black? He wonders as he walks down a familiar street. Everywhere there is the glitter and shine of watching eyes, and Pitch paints a simple grin of cruelty on his face, to throw them off. He is being watched, and he knows somehow without knowing that awareness will not be taken lightly. He has to be cunning, outsmart the creature in his head.

He slips into the child’s bedroom, and parrots the phrase they have allowed him. “What an adorable dream.” It slips out, smoothly, like smoke, and he watches his grey hand rise to touch the golden dreamsand.

His sight is already blurring around the edges, ready to take him back to the street, but Pitch persists. He is almost there.

The watching eyes on the lamp glitter with amusement, and then Pitch is gone.

This time, he moves with purpose. He knows he can outsmart it. He was so close last time. He appears in the girl’s bedroom, hardly takes note of anything. Words choke and swell in his throat. “Oh, I thought I heard the clippity clop of a unicorn!”

He hears the sounds, so ecstatic in his rebellion that he fails to notice the choking blackness sweeping over him until it is too late.

Pitch Black almost runs to the bedroom of the child now. He knows this game, has had a glimpse of the rules. To be contrary, he forces his shadows to let him out of the closet, seeping through the keyhole. He ignores the blink of the hypnotic lamp. “Oh, I thought I heard the clippity clop of a unicorn!” he sneers, and magnanimously, the blinking eyes seem to allow him this little rebellion, but blackness edges dangerously at his sight.

“What an adorable dream,” he adds quickly, and it recedes, at least until he says, cautiously, “And look at her! Precious child, so sweet, so full of hope and wonder, why, there’s only one thing missing.”

For a second Pitch swears he feels curiosity, a tint of confusion burning in the edges of his mind, and he gulps around a dry throat he knows he cannot feel. “A touch of fear,” he sneers, and gold tinted rage slices over him like the crack of a whip.

Pitch swears at the sight of the street. If he ever gets out of this dream-labyrinth, he swears he will never go near a rainy dark street ever again. Foully, he stomps down it, eager to get to the child’s bedroom. For the first time, he wonders if she has a name, if she is trapped here like he is. Is that why he is always reset before he can tamper with her sweet dream? Something, somewhere, is protecting her, but not enough to keep him from her presence entirely.

But why?

Is there an entire world, trapped like he is, in a repeating dream that never ends? Who would do such a thing – and who would have the power?

Well, Pitch smirks, they’ve made a grave mistake, in letting him gain awareness. The antithesis of dreams is nightmares, and Fear is close enough.

He’ll start with the girl. Wake her, and make his way around the world until everything was fear and darkness. They’d all wake up from that, wouldn’t they?

Who would keep living a nightmare?

Pitch discovers that as long he doesn’t try to touch the little girl’s dream, he can monologue as long as he likes. He asks convoluted questions that subtly prod at this existence. Once or twice, he even feels a swell of attention, warm and patronisingly amused, like a kiss over the back of his knuckles, the press of a tongue on the nape of his neck. It is profoundly intimate, and Pitch finds himself blushing and stammering over his words, incredibly uncomfortable without knowing why, as if his entire state mental and physical is laid bare for this creature to mockingly peruse, and found lacking.

He hates the feeling of being unwrapped like a particularly disappointing Christmas present.

“ _Why does it never work?”_ he shouts, one day, when a tinge of black appears on the unicorn’s flank but nothing more.

The swell of amusement tumbles into his mind like hot rocks, burning as they carve deep tracks into his mind, and Pitch cries out as he is driven to his knees on the wet pavement.

_**MY LITTLE SHADOW,**_ the voice croons, and blood sheets out of his nose and ears. **_NO ONE BELIEVES IN YOU._**

_So this is how you play,_ Pitch thinks with satisfaction, _I get all the little brats to believe in me… and then wake them up, one by one._

It’s almost suspiciously easy after that. He doesn’t think about how easy it is to turn the unicorn black again and again, transforming them into nightmare horses that grow when he sends them out the window. He uses the repetitive cycle in his favour, turning nightmare after nightmare until he’s amassed enough for a veritable army, he’s sure.

Returning to the street, he issues a challenge to the watching eye of the moon, and falls into the game.

He’s sure he’s met the Guardians before. He wouldn’t feel so strongly about them if he hasn’t, he tells himself. Nonetheless, the only one that glints with any familiarity is the glitter of gold on the Sandman’s skin, the dreamsand Pitch is well acquainted with by now. The Sandman catches his eye at one point and _smiles,_ dusky-rose lips caught by small square teeth.

Pitch doesn’t really know how to react to the idea that the Sandman is more amused by his bid for power and freedom than threatened.

_Well,_ he thinks logically, _I’ll just kill him then._

It’s a dream, he reasons, _I should be able to change what I like._

The arrow plunges deep into the Sandman’s back, and the black sand moves over him like a tide. The Sandman turns to face him as he dies, falling to his knees, and Pitch begins to gloat, only for his words to catch in his throat when, instead of looking horrified or scared, the Sandman _winks_ and licks his lips.

So bemused is Pitch, he barely fights back when the lithe young frost spirit knocks him from his perch of writhing dark sand.

He regains himself quickly after. A blip in the dream… It must be. Perhaps the engineer is finally slipping. Pitch’s confidence increases quickly. He thinks he should be able to feel stronger, as more and more believe in him, but all that happens is he gets more of the dark sand. It should be good, he thinks.

He gets to the point of one child believing when it all goes to hell.

The dimwitted little idiot brings back the Sandman, the influx of bright insufferable gold dreamsand, the bars of the cages they’re all trapped in. He shouts and rails, but there is nothing he can do, so he runs.

He doesn’t know how he will escape, but the engineer’s little Guardians stop him with ease. The Nightmares pace out of the gloom, and Pitch feels a chill of horror when he looks into their eyes – bright bright bright gold eyes, identical to the ones that watch him everywhere he goes.

Realisation pours into him like icewater, and the darkness breaks, charges forward to sweep him up towards mindlessness.

_**WELL, IT’S BEEN FUN, LITTLE SHADOW.** _

He screams as the mocking voice echoes in his mind.

There is no street.

There is no little girl.

There is nothing but fear… and darkness… and him.

Strings of light flash, like spiderwebs. He is caught up in a thousand sticky threads, eyes closed and stuck shut by sleep accumulating, muscles weak and broken like a baby bird’s. There is a rhythmic thump of a heartbeat through his nerves, the slow gust of deeply dreaming people. He tries to open his eyes, weak and blurring like a newborn. He winces and whines as the light stabs his eyes, soft and gold.

They are in a spider’s web. It is huge, suspended over the gaping mouth of a canyon, all dust-raw rock, and there are thousands and thousands of tiny little cocoons, but the dimly moving figures within aren’t flies. Sticky ropes wrap firmly around his chest and limbs like the slimy tentacles of an octopus, and he feels the ripple of laughter through the sand.

There is sand in his mouth, in his throat, otherwise he’d be screaming, screaming for help and mercy as he sees the spider harvest the dreaming little flies caught in his web. It is a little man, pulping the skull of a baby between his tiny hands, grains of golden sleep drifting free. Soft and gold. Cuddly and gentle-looking, but in his eyes there are fiery suns that burn with a toppled Age’s hatred, and the sand of his arms and hands are dyed rust red from the blood of his sweet little dreamers.

The little man’s tongue flicks out of his lips. _**I TRIED SO HARD TO GIVE YOU WHAT YOU YEARNED FOR, BUT YOU THREW IT IN MY FACE.**_

Sex blurs his vision, rosebud lips demanding on his own, tiny nails clawing over his chest, painful sensation, drowsiness warm and dark. There are restraints around his wrists and a gasping weight on his hips, rocking like the breath of a lullaby.

His eyes stream with water like tears.

_Let me wake up._

_Let me wake up._

He slips back into another dream. There is a little girl, and she needs a nightmare.


	10. hermit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Muse Ebony (character belonging to ksclaw) consults Selena on love advice. She is unhelpful. Set in some miraculous AU where everyone survived the Golden Age as some sort of fantasy creature. Implied Selena/Archaline.

“I’ve contemplated becoming a hermit,” the Muse said rather flatly, “Stars know that other people have never done me any good.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Selena said idly, wringing out her sopping hair. The rusalka scowled at the twigs stuck in it, and patiently pulled out a brush from the little pack around her waist.

Ebony watched her absently. It was the full moon, the only time that Selena could leave the lake her spirit had been imprisoned in unless it was to climb one of the nearby trees, or a particular week sometime in June. Largely, Selena spent a great deal of her time spying on the village women that came to bathe in her lake and most assuredly not putting any effort into dying a peaceful death and moving on.

Either way, Selena could not look less interested in Ebony’s problems.

“It’s Koz, again,” Ebony supplied when it became clear that Selena wasn’t going to ask, “He’s still calling himself Pitch, and he kidnapped this little frost sprite last week.”

“I’m going to tell you the same thing that I tell your daughter whenever she comes to bitch at me about Pitch Black,” Selena began, “if I had the chance to cut that asshole up again and watch him scream for mercy as he was possessed, I’d do it without a second thought. And is this going to take long? I’m meeting my girl later.”

“Your what? Selena - since when -”

“Around the same time that my previous girlfriend got turned into a fucking vampire. She says I taste like clear water, by the way. If you’re thirsty.” Selena winked.

Ebony shook her head. “No thanks,” she said tartly, “I’m married.”

“Become a hermit,” Selena advised, “leave all civilisation behind. You’ll be happier for it.”

“Have I ever told you how shit you are at life advice?” Ebony said, tiredly.

Selena shrugged. “I’m an undead water spirit that’s technically died twice, I wouldn’t exactly call myself an expert at living.”


	11. arranged marriage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I wish you would write a fic, where Apollo gets married to Ebony, and in some way the two of them manage to get along." - Unfortunately, that doesn't happen, and everyone is a bigoted ass. Golden Age Awesome Foursome implied. Ebony is ksclaw's.

“I will not accept such an insult to myself and my Line,” the Tsar Lawful, Apollo Lunanoff, seethed. He paced to and fro in the office like a caged and whipped hound, ribs pressing out, lean and hungering for flesh. He was naked but for a knotted cloth around his hips and a loose robe hanging off his shoulders, and his skin still gleamed with sweat from exercise like rain streaked marble. His lip curled into a sneer of vivid horror and disgust.

“To think that I would join myself with…” He broke off with a vitriolic shudder.

“Now-” the councilwoman Archaline broke in, a lovely creature, and lovelier with her attention focused on him, one strand of her thick dark hair twirled innocuously around one slender dark finger, “Don’t you think you’re perhaps overreacting?”

“Stars forbid,” muttered the Tsarina Blessed, a young woman by the name of Selena Chonderlee, seated beside her lover and mostly occupied with her wristcomm. It gleamed faintly with complaint, scrawls of legislature disappearing as agile fingers tapped the screen.

“I would rather sleep with swine,” Apollo sneered. “It is what it amounts to!”

“Apollo dear, I hardly doubt the girl is thrilled to marry you either,” Selena told him sharply, flicking her eyes up from the screen to hold his for a burning moment. “But a thorough blood mix will do our Line good. I have borne you a powerful Lunanoff heir - do not interrupt me, Apollo, I recognise that face - and it’s time that we, ah, sow our wild oats a little more among the… common populace.”

“She doesn’t have an ounce in her! Not a spark of magic! The ‘girl’ is so ‘common’ that it’s an honour to call her human!” Apollo exploded. A curl of smoke huffed away from his nostril, and he made a visible effort to calm himself.

Selena waited a moment to give him time to collect his temper, and then continued, in a markedly softer, more persuasive tone. “I have spent months trying to undo the damage that your father did. The lower folk believe us godly, yes - but not merciful gods! What better to convince the lower folk that there will be no more Purges than the Tsar Lawful himself taking an Untapped woman to his Court? All you would have to do is breed a living child off of her.”

“And that at least I’ve made as easy for you as I can,” Archaline broke in, taking a sip of her wine with a connoisseur’s approving hum. She paused a moment to savour the taste, then dutifully continued.

“The woman is… diminutive,” and her nose wrinkled faintly at this mark of recessive breeding, “but she is not too difficult an eyesore, by my own measure, at least. And there are potions I can give you to turn even the most unsuitable bedmate into a star.”

At this, she smirked at Selena, who obligingly rolled her eyes. Selena’s use of her services in order to make the months of her heir-contract with Apollo bearable were a familiar joke between the three and both Apollo and Selena took the gentle ribbing with easy grace.

“It’s not the act. It’s the dishonour of the act. Why me?” Apollo demanded, suddenly petulant, “Where’s your contribution to the part, beloved Tsarina of mine?”

Selena swiped her wristcomm and dismissed the screen with a tired sigh. “Check among my lovers and my Priestesshood, Apollo, you will find more than enough examples of my own… contribution. And you know I’ve been considering loaning myself out for another heir-contract.”

Apollo waved a hand irritably. “You’re young in the age of breeding, Selena, and the complications you had with Mim-” His countenance softened imperceptibly at the thought of his son.

“I would not let her contract herself without considering her health, my Tsar,” said Archaline, with some force. Chastened, Apollo pulled a chair out and sat at the table. His mobile face assumed dragging, mournful lines.

“It need only be once in bed,” Archaline said, “With my potions. And beyond that, just furnish her with an allowance of money and let the public see her spending it. She won’t cause you trouble.” Her hand dropped to her lace-covered thigh, to her knife strapped there. “If she does, I will …take care of her.”

Her smile was both unpleasant and lascivious. Selena looked sidelong at her, the brush of her dyed lashes whispering over suddenly bright cheeks. Her near-translucent skin made blushes wholly obvious.

“Now, don’t spoil an Untapped brat with yourself, dear,” she said, and diamonds shimmered at her throat and powdered over her cheeks. Her gaze was clear and cold.

“Oho, there’s a snob in you after all!” Archaline crowed. She looked delighted.

The two bent together, as if magnetised by a silent and powerful force. Glacial and silvery, Selena was a phantom gowned in white, loomed over by the dark, lean shadow of Archaline, red lipstick and breath fragrant with rich wine. Silently, Apollo brooded, a Machveiallian portrait daubed in heavy oils. There was a tense silence in the atmosphere juxtaposed with a languid sort of recoil that betrayed the familiarity of such scenes.

Apollo broke their gentle kissing with a shout. Selena, gently reproving, laid her small hand on the table and tapped it, rings flashing.

“Well,” she demanded icily, “Speak up, then!”

“I just don’t want to,” Apollo said in a tone dangerously near a whine. “But you’re going to make me anyway because if I don’t agree now then you’ll just bring Koz in and he’ll lecture me about honour and duty until I want to pluck out my eyes!”

Archaline smiled at the mention of her beloved husband, whom they all knew had a stronger effect on the irresponsible, often mercurial Tsar Lawful than Koz was aware.

“He’s not wrong,” she said in an aside to Selena.

“Accept it, will you?” Selena snapped, rising to her feet in a billow of pale pink taffeta. “The girl comes in three weeks. You will be in attendance. The creature’s parents are worth nothing after having borne one of the Untapped, but we must be courteous.” Her demure lip plumped in annoyance at the necessity.

Archaline, stifling a chuckle, followed her with competitive swiftness. “Indeed,” she said, looping her arm through the Tsarina’s and glancing down at her with eyes twinkling, “We must be courteous!”

So saying, they swept out, and Apollo, with no other recourse, dropped the cloth from around his hips and went to bathe.

* * *

The ship that held the Ebony girl - for that was her name, according to Archaline’s bored report that morning - was an older model that kept good repair. It was clean and every effort had been made to sand away the decades of grease that crusted the landing locks, but beside the slender, gleaming corsairs harboured in the private section of the Tsar’s marina, the difference could not have been clearer. Nevertheless, the servant that opened the ramp for the Untapped girl and her parents to descend was well-trained and obedient, and did not quiver under the force of the Tsar Lawful’s glare.

Selena, sat some distance away in an elegant skimmer, tutted. Archaline lounged beside her and plucked grapes from a tray at her elbow, not even pretending to be interested in the girl’s arrival.

Selena, strictly, was not required to be there. She would be needed to officiate the contract taken out between Apollo and the girl, but that was all. Selena had drawn up an heir-contract. The girl’s parents had no other living child - wisely, perhaps, considering their first’s defect - and it would do Apollo no harm to sire an heir for the family and strengthen ties to that part of the Constellations. The brat, after it was born, might then be safely shipped away back to its familial home, and wouldn’t be under the jurisdiction of the Lunanoffs any longer.

“Doll, don’t scowl so,” Archaline told her lazily and absently, Selena smoothed out the frown on her forehead. She reached for a small compact mirror in her purse and checked her complexion. Pale. Her lips pursed again. Concentrating, she skewed a facsimile of a courteous smile onto her rather pinched little mouth and brushed some more blush over her cheeks.

In the backseat, Seraphina mashed the buttons of some game intently. She rocked and twisted with the effort of it, as if her involuntary movements had an effect. Beside her, and curled up in on himself like a sleepy cat, Mim dozed.

“I worry for him,” she confessed abruptly.

The Tsar, on the arm of his dear General, was descending the steps that led down to the wide dock, a ghostly beauty in an off-shoulder misty dress, sleek and slim-fitting. The colours would match his eyes and accentuate the marks of the Lunanoff curse; Selena rather approved. He had left his hair unblackened, so that white streaks showed through. Beside the solid golden bronze statue that was the physically imposing General, the Tsar looked as slight and fleeting as a moonstruck night’s momentary madness.

“For him?” Archaline snorted. “Worry for the girl. Look.”

For the Untapped girl had just stepped onto the ramp, accompanied by her lady mother as was proper. She was too far away for Selena to notice much about her, but she did observe the healthy dark colour of her skin - not at all like the sickly complexion so many of her Line were cursed with - and the comparative ease of her movements, showing a mind well accustomed to and at ease in its body. But the girl was absolutely tiny.

To Kozmotis, gallantly offering the Untapped woman a hand down the ramp, she was barely the height of his midriff. A bellicose frown distorted the Untapped woman’s face, and even from the distance, Selena heard the shrill snap she offered him for his courtesy. She winced. Constellar was not a language to be shouted.

“I begin to wonder if perhaps I vastly overestimated the breeding of this one,” said Selena, doubtfully, and Archaline outright laughed at her.

“Listen to yourself, doll of mine! Besides, she’s-” and Archaline’s voice deliberately dropped into the affected Mesan drawl of her childhood, “puttin’ it'on.”

“She is?” Selena squinted. She was not half as adept at reading the subtle signs and nuances of character and behaviour as her lover, and if the Ebony woman was dissembling then Selena couldn’t see it. She knew better than to doubt Archaline’s observations, however. Why though, would Ebony wish her first appearances to be so unfavourable?

Unless, she rather hoped that she would be found so unsuitable that she’d be sent away? Surely, she had to see that an heir-contract with the Tsar Lawful would put her family name in good stead and remove some of the stain from her own Untapped nature.

“Oh yes,” said Archaline. “I’ve done my research. Were you even listening to my report this morning?”

Selena shot her a testy look. Archaline’s lips quirked, but she elaborated without protest. “Pookan-trained, like you. Family was rather eager to keep that one hushed, too. Qualified in several different forms of self-defence and according to friends and past-beaus, pleasant enough company, if hotheaded. She’ll be a good enough match for him if we can get their passions to work together rather than against. Your dear husband does enjoy a little firm female guidance from time to time. A girl with some kick and fight might do us all some good.”

Looking abashed and a little confused, the General was withdrawing himself to his Tsar, to whom he looked for instruction.

A nonchalant flip of his fingers dismissed Koz, who bowed as obediently as any dog and trotted towards the skimmer, sending one last curious glance back over his shoulder at the Ebony girl.

She was talking to the Tsar now, overriding her lady mother, and Apollo was humouring her with amusement written in the slant of his body and mockery in his stance. She, a tiny thing with more hair than face it seemed, faced off defensively against him until he at last offered her his arm, to which she reacted with some shock. Selena wondered if Apollo’s many physical charms were working on her. There was scarcely a person in the Constellations who hadn’t entertained thoughts on his beauty. If she was as tough as Archaline implied, probably not. 

“She’s terrified,” were Koz’s first words as he loped over, white teeth bright in his flashing grin. “I could almost taste the fear rolling off her. Move aside, dear,” he said in an aside, gesturing for Archaline to move over so that he could sit in the skimmer.

“Put your shadow away,” Archaline teased, slapping her husband’s shoulder. “What do you think of her?”

Koz shrugged complacently and stuffed his mouth with a handful of grapes. “She’s more scared of the rest of the Court than of him. No, Ebony is not frightened of Apollo at all!” He chuckled, the sound booming through his barrel chest like an avalanche.

“Hey, Daddy,” said Seraphina noncommittally from the backseat, perked up now that her favourite parent was in attendance, “Can we go to that cafe that we went to last time we were here?”

“Maybe, princess,” promised Koz. He cast a look at Selena, who was scowling at her wristcomm blackly.

“Eulalia needs me to officiate something or another again,” she complained, “I don’t know why I bothered making her High Priestess if all she’s going to do is ask me to do her job for her.”

“She’s young,” Koz said placatingly, “Give her time.”

“We’ll drop you off at the Temple,” Archaline offered. “And I’m sure Mim would be fine with hanging with us for the afternoon, wouldn’t you, little man?” She twisted round in her seat to look at Mim.

The young boy’s eyes were open, round and reflective like moons. He nodded silently, and winced when Seraphina jabbed his soft flesh with her sharp elbow.

“Do we have to?” she whined, and Koz frowned at her. Seraphina shrunk under his disapproval.

“Would you? Oh, thank you!” Selena looked earnestly grateful, if long-suffering, as she typed a quick reply to Eulalia.

As the skimmer lifted, Koz glanced back down the docks to see Ebony and Apollo there, walking together down the marina. They were a pair so violently mismatched that it looked comical, and Koz worried his lip between his teeth and decided to go check on them both individually later. But for now - he grasped his wife’s hand, and turned to smile at his daughter - it was time to seize a rare day off.


	12. physician excerpt a

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Shortly after the contract ceremony (different from the induction of Tsarina), in which Asterion and Selena are drugged and consummate their marriage, Yarra and Selena share a moment in the middle of the night." - Physician

The chambers of the Tsar Lawful’s consort had a faintly stale air. Like all of the oldest buildings in the Towers of the Moon, there were no straight lines or sleek, angular edges such as modern tastes preferred; everything was rounded and smooth, like living in a bubble, the windows were all faintly ovular, and the glass a strange, coolly soapy feel to the touch, slippery with some ancient magic. The dun, cave-like stone had been plastered and the wet plaster painted over and then sealed behind fine, precious pigments. The paintings depicted almost oppressively rich scenes of tasteful living, like heaving platters of rich blue grapes lounging next to swollen glasses of luxuriously red wine.   
It wasn’t that the chambers hadn’t been immaculately cleaned. They had, almost unbearably so, until the whole rooms had any essence of former human habitation stripped and bleached away. The air felt dead and unbreathed, and Selena felt like a visitor, a hoax, a charlatan, though she wore the Tsar’s contract around her wrist.  
It felt so alien compared to Virgo, clean and open and brilliant with the hazy panels of gauze and arches to let in the brilliant sunlight, to allow the wind to circulate and blow in dry dust. The bathroom, with its low dun textured walls, sloping around to hold one teardrop shaped red lantern and the deep dark pool, like a cave recessed deep inside a tower thousands of feet off the ground, felt huge and terrifying, mystifying in the dark.   
Selena and Yarra had tiptoed in together, holding hands like little girls again and feeling lost in all that space. There was a little maid’s room off to the corner of the main bedchamber, but even the maid’s room was bigger than the one they had shared back in Spica. It was an inescapable reminder that things had changed.  
The huge bed was thick and set deep into the floor, Celestial City style, overflowing with sumptuous cushions, and curled up within it, Selena felt lost. The room was full of strange and unnatural shadows, and she hated being this low down; Spica’s raised beds may have been less convenient for drunk, fumbling bodies to fall into and rut their night away, but it let the cool air blow under it.   
But the Celestial City was cold, as Selena was quickly discovering. She eyed the round eye of the window, left partially ajar during the day in the hope that it would blow some living air into the place, bitterly regretted now. The shivering teeth of the icy gusts drifting around the room attacked her every so often and sent her into a shivering fit, curling up on herself to try and maintain warmth. She had piled herself thickly with the blankets around her until her lumpy body under the covers had no shape other than round, but it still wasn’t enough to stave it off.   
One such gust drove in now, lifting the lip of the heavy embroidered curtain and making skittering shadows leap over the opposing wall. Selena shrunk back, quivering and trying to pull her legs tighter against her chest.   
She winced. She still ached… there. From what they had done together, with the taste of the drugged wine on their lips, before the adoring eyes of the whole Celestial Court. The memories slipped away like oiled fish whenever she tried to grab them, and Selena didn’t know what to think about that except for a pathetic gratefulness mixed with a terrible, anxious fear. Had she been good enough? How badly had it hurt? Had she pleased them?   
The humiliation, though, that stayed, and Selena stuffed a fist in her mouth and squeezed her eyes tight, like that would erase what everyone had seen. A clenching revolted low in her belly, and dimly, Selena realised that she was going to make herself sick if she kept thinking about it.  
Oh, suns, it was so cold! She wished that she’d closed the window. She wished that she was brave enough to get up and close it.  
Pathetic. And she was supposed to be the next Blessed.   
The thought triggered such a violent wave of terrified nausea that instinctively Selena lurched up to the side of the bowl-shaped bed, convinced she was about to throw up. For a moment, she hung there, feeling the chill of the air against her sweaty forehead and the protest of her used body and trembling, exhausted muscles, and then Selena sighed and let herself go limp.  
There wasn’t even a speck of dust under any of the furniture, directly at Selena’s eye-level. Indeed, there were even tiny frescoes twisting and curling all over, in addition to the shimmering mosaic in the floor, something like waves, she thought. The sight made her thoroughly miserable.  
Without further thought, Selena dragged her blankets around her shoulders and stiffly rolled to her feet, hissing as her feet touched the chilly floor and quick-stepping towards the unassuming little door behind the tucked back drape that led to the maid’s room, and Yarra.  
Nervously, Selena hesitated at the door, fighting a silent internal war. She didn’t want to disturb Yarra. But Yarra was her friend, Yarra always made everything feel better even when Selena felt like she was going to drown under suffocating tidal waves of stress and fear.   
She shook her head, pressing her palm flat against the door. It was bitter cold, of course, and she yelped and yanked her back almost immediately, but the damage had been done.  
The light of an unshuttered lantern flooded under the door, and Selena felt embarrassment burn her cheeks as Yarra’s sleepy voice mumbled from behind the door, “‘Lene? That you?”  
“I’m sorry,” she whispered back through the door, and heard Yarra palpably groan, no doubt exhausted.  
“C’mere, you daft girl,” Yarra sighed nonetheless.  
Pushing open the door, Selena shuffled in, head ducked and trailing blankets. In the light of the lantern, Yarra’s dark hair rippled like ebony, and her eyes were deep and black, but her smile was the same, if tired. She beckoned, flipping back the covers and scooting over to the side. Tentatively, Selena climbed in next to her, feeling very cold and very scared and nervous, and lay there like a plank until Yarra wrapped her arms around her and pillowed her head on Selena’s chest.   
“What’s on your mind, ‘Lene?” she asked.  
Selena exhaled, feeling tension unknot everywhere with Yarra’s warmth radiating into her and the familiar feeling of their bodies pressed together, warm and close and soft and safe. She settled her arm over Yarra’s shoulder, holding in a breath until she deemed it safe to leave it there.  
When Selena said nothing, Yarra hugged her tighter and whispered reflectively, “It’s all changing, isn’t it? Fuck, ‘Lene, you’re the Tsar’s consort, and you’re going to be the next Tsarina… It’s just… It just feels ridiculous, doesn’t it?”  
“Yes,” said Selena softly. “Tsarina.”  
The title tasted like lead and panic in her mouth. Maybe that was just bile.  
“And… everything’s so different here, like… the parties, and - you know when that crowd came up around you after the contract, I’ve never seen anything like that before-!” Yarra’s voice was soft with dawning excitement, and her eyes shone with the memory of the lights, the music, the addictive presence.  
“No,” said Selena, tightly, feeling something odd in her throat. “I don’t remember.”  
Yarra shifted up on to her elbow and peered down at Selena, nose to nose in the dark. “What do you mean?” she said, and in the darkness her blush was barely visible, creeping up over her cheeks. “You were… uh, there. And involved.”  
“There was something in the wine,” said Selena tonelessly. “I… don’t remember anything. Fragments.”  
“Oh, ‘Lene,” said Yarra, and hugged her so tightly that Selena felt her ribs creak.   
She gulped, and felt her eyes water, felt an onset of ugly, messy crying come on. But she was so glad, so damned glad, that Yarra was there with her, able to hold her and fuss her and soothe the terror and pain away.  
“‘Lene?” said Yarra, after a moment, voice hushed with awe and renewed sleepiness, “You’re glowing again.”  
“Sorry,” Selena whispered, and Yarra yawned.  
“‘S alright,” she said tiredly, “‘M used to it.”  
With Yarra’s head tucked against her faintly glowing skin, their bodies tangled together and breathing together in gentle, warm comfort, Selena felt the ebbs of the stress that had held her captive since that very first meeting with her future husband slowly dissipate, and for the first time in a very long while, drifted off to a peaceful, easy and deep sleep.


	13. wanted, dead or alive

The crack of the whip. Staccato, sharp. Sandy grins around his cigar, slow and fat and lazy. His bowler hat is aslant over one eye, but Sandy doesn’t need his eyes to see this beast. He talks, incessantly.  
“The real question-” Pitch huffs, twisting sinuously out of the whip’s lash, pinstripe tails flaring and one gloved grey hand seizing his top hat before it fell, “-is really, who is in the wrong here-”   
He yelps as the whip cuts past him again, then stares at the lashing tail in disbelief. “Sandy, that’s barbed! Are you trying to kill me?” He pulls out a silver revolver.  
Sandy chews contemplatively on his cigar and bounces a little on the balls of his feet. He smirks, with no remorse, winking with one uncovered eye.  
“Be that as it may, Mr Mansnoozie, you’re officially under arrest,” Pitch tells him sternly, levelling the revolver at him. “I’ve strict orders to take you in for however many homicides. Dead or alive.”  
Sandy shrugs, unimpressed, and worries his lip between his teeth. He retrieves the whip, knots it into a monkey-fist. A second-rate killer like Pitch, even if he is pretending to be a good little detective, couldn’t catch Sandy if his life depended on it (which it does, Sandy thinks, eyeing him appreciatively), and Sandy prefers not to mark his pretty face too badly this early on.  
He uncoils the whip. Pitch groans, having learnt too well from last time, and dives for cover just as Sandy winds his arm back to strike.  
By the time he scrambles free, the only thing left of Sandy is the chewed cigar.

 

 


	14. vermilion part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> uses @ksclaw's ebony  
> split personality disorder, drugs, sex

“I have a sister, a twin,” Ebony had told Koz three months into their relationship. “She’s always doing bad things.”  
“Bad, huh?” He’d laughed. “Not as bad as you clocking that referee in the face at my game.”  
Ebony had bit her lip and went quiet. Archaline was bad. And she always did bad things, and everyone always blamed Ebony. She always seemed to skew things so that no one suspected her.  
Ebony dreaded Koz finding out some of the things Archaline had done.  
Archaline’s scarlet dress was rumpled over Ebony’s bed when she got in and her ruby lipstick was smeared on her pillow. She leaned around the door of the bathroom, eyes bright and hair, for once unbound, rippling.  
“Sister!” She was high. Her pupils were blown out wide and Ebony remembered the prick of the injection, the itch in her veins.  
“How was the party last night?” Ebony asked her, loosening her tie, and Archaline grinned, wild and feckless.  
“You look pretty tired, sister, you sure you can’t tell me?”  
“Shut up, Archaline, I told mother that I was staying in and doing homework last night.”  
Archaline swayed and grinned. It was one of those voluptuous smiles, corrupt and cruel. “I did a bad thing, sister. You mustn’t let Koz find out.”  
“What did you do?” Ebony asked, warily. Her palms began to sweat. The soft flesh of her forearms were aching. The world was rocking, just slightly. She was too hot, discarded her jacket.  
“I found a girl,” Archaline sing-songed.  
Blonde hair so white it looked bleached, silky when clenched in a fist, melting doe eyes shiny and bright, pretty pink nails scrabbling at her shoulders, scratching her with their ferocity, trying to pull her closer, closer, silvery pink dress hiked up around her thick hips. She remembered.  
“Sister, sister, look. You should get those checked.” Archaline’s red painted nail was poking at Ebony’s shoulder, where underneath the white shirt, blood had seeped through from scratches clawed into her flesh.  
“Does he know about me, sister?” Archaline taunted, “Does he know?”  
Ebony sucked in a breath. “Koz mustn’t know,” she hissed sharply, a reminder, “No one ever believes it was you!”  
Archaline laughed. It was a cruel, bad sort of laugh. “Are you sure it was, baby sister?”

 

 


	15. starfolk

_The star people told stories about the time before the humans came.  
_

_They told stories about how their pilots could roam freely over the universe without fear of harm, without fear of being chained to serve some human master’s pleasure._

_They told stories about elder stars who spanned the width and breadth of galaxies, who became constellations in their own right, and studied the deep forces of the universe until they became one with them; Fate, Will, Gravity, Magic, Light, to name a few._

_They told stories about the Darkness and their cousins, the Fearlings, who in those days were not Fearlings but simply patches of darkness where a star’s heart had broken, and it no longer could muster the will to shine._

_They told stories about a time when their young weren’t stolen to work in whorehouses and their old weren’t put to death before their weight could eclipse their shine and they lost themselves to darkness, as every star must do one day._

_They told stories about a time when the people of the stars were free._

_Few listened to these stories. The stars worked in dreams and hopes and fancies, building every grain of their bodies out of one more consumed dream, but remembering all they had lost led only to dark paths full of anger. Passively, the young preferred to forget, and comply with the restrictions the dominant humans placed upon them, and try to eke some hint of light out of the shadow of human corruption._

_The elders looked at these young, fresh lights, and saw in them the ferocity of long-buried rage and hurt, and knew that for every time they said they would not listen, some part of them understood and absorbed the grievance done to their once proud race._

_It was a cruel thing and an uneasy balance, because for every warped fragment of hate there shone a great love and tenderness; for the stars could not help but love the delicate humans, with their clever, albeit narrow minds, a fertile field ploughed daily for the night’s reward in vivid dreams, the sustenance and daily bread of the star people._

_The oldest stars remembered the true Golden Age at their first meetings, and the tragedy of the loss of the first human who had known the fierce and bright love of stars. Dimitri, whose death forced the creation of the Charter sharing his name for the interaction of humans and stars, a scout pilot who found a nebula of stars and lost his mind and eventually, his life. The pain of the shocking introduction to mortality was a deep wound unlike any other, and it would be a lie to say the people of the stars ever recovered from being so wholly, closely presented with something so foreign to them - death._

_The star people told stories about the time before the humans, and they told stories about the time after the humans._

_The Nightmare King, the humans had called him. The star people knew him by other names. As he had freed the Fearlings, so the Fearlings came to free their cousins._

_Breaker of Collars, Snapper of Necks. Plunderer of Dreams, Lover of Stars. Ender of Lives._

_The star people told stories about the time a corrupted human called Kozmotis Pitchiner taught them how to die._

_**Death, when all else fails, is the ultimate freedom.** _


	16. wildqueens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> young!Tooth/Seraphina

“Seraphina!” Tooth shouted, scrambling over a fallen tree trunk and stumbling to the ground. The fertile, wet soil clumped and clung to her hands - beneath it rocks scratched her palms. “Oh - no, no-!”  
Seraphina was there, back pinned to a massive old oak tree, roots and bark growing over her limp body. A metamorphosis - leaves sprouted from her arms and cheeks, her hair fanned like creeping vines over the solid trunk of the tree, the knobbles of swollen bark obscuring most of her shape.   
Tooth ran to her, calling her name. She came to a stop before her, tentative hands wishing for some place to touch. She settled for Seraphina’s long cheeks, cracked over with scabs of bark that ridged painfully directly out of reddened skin.   
“Sera, Sera, please wake up,” she begged, tried to tug some of the delicate leaves that webbed over her left eye. Slowly, slowly, a small crack appeared in the weathered face, underneath which a lambent emerald glow throbbed.   
Tooth felt the breath compress in her chest as the eye slowly opened, revealing the cold, alien stare of Mother Nature, who had long left Seraphina behind. That hazy, ancient stare lifted, stared through her and into her, and Tooth felt the quake of some primordial fear in her bones.  
It was always so easy to forget that Seraphina held the strings of a world’s heartbeat in the palm of her hand. But this wasn’t Seraphina - this was Mother Nature, in all her coldness, her callousness, her bitter numbness, the ashes of a woman sunken too deep in herself.   
“Do you even know who I am?” Tooth dared to whisper, and the eye blinked with the steady, terrible unaffectedness of a turgid tide. Rainwater welled in that green eye, ran in little rivulets down the scarred cheek.   
Tooth kissed her, and Seraphina’s lips were as cold and hard as icebound forests. She could feel the rainwater trickling over the palm of her hand, and if she fooled herself, she could pretend that Seraphina was pressing back, just the slightest amount, like a flower drinking in sunlight.  
“Don’t go,” said Tooth in a cracked voice, feeling ugly sobs swelling in her throat, a rasping burn behind her eyes. “Where am I supposed to go? You can’t - go to sleep like this, I need you-!”  
The last wind gusted from Seraphina’s lips, ruffled in Tooth’s feathers, and Tooth wept as a thick skin of crumbling bark edged down over her eyebrow, concealing her slowly closing eye. There was no warmth or yielding left in her body but Tooth still grabbed it anyway, her salt tears watering the sealed bark that had grown from Seraphina’s skin, trapping her inside the tree.  
“What am I supposed to do when you’re not here?” She asked again, faintly, but this time there was no response.


	17. Mansnoozie brothers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> background of Sandy and Chandra

Chandra Mansnoozie was very protective of his brother, some say even jealously so, and spent all the time he could glued to Sandy’s side. The brothers were the greatest of friends and tenderest of companions, and Chandra could never find it within himself to refuse Sandy anything, not that his little brother ever asked overmuch of him, since he was simple and content with his plain, sunny life on their slow moving, sleepy home world, nestled like a glittering desert gem in the deepest and blackest depths of space, the far twinkling lights of their ancient brethren like smiles from the past down upon the scurrying children. 

 This happy acceptance confused Chandra, who was born tempestuous, easily bored and mercurial. He dreamt of impossible things, deeds of great valour and treasures so vast it spanned endless marble halls, all with the ambition of laying them at Sandy’s feet. 

There was no creature more devoted than Chandra, in every dream he thought of Sandy’s smile, and in his waking moments, there was no sight more pleasing to his eye than his little brother, not the glittering stars, nor the sandswept deserts, the rocky caverns of their nests, all were eclipsed by the joy he felt in untangling Sandy’s wild hair, sharing in the happiness of this wondrous creature, even if his gentle nature was bizarre to Chandra, even as familiar as the brothers were. 

 Unfortunately, Sandy’s easygoing attitude was bemusing to more than just Chandra, especially one Betamo, a young, rash and reckless star born with dreams of power and glory in their heart, who sought to realise that power by dominating and bullying gentle Sandy, who simply obliged them, too naive and innocent to understand their mockery, even when they spat such cruel accusations at him as to call him broken and dreamless, and what use was a star who never dreamt of anything? Perhaps, goaded Betamo, Sandy could find a use as the pleasure-toy of men, if he could force his simple mind to understand shapeshifting. 

Children, even star children, born and shaped from dreams, can be very cruel.

 Chandra, when he discovered this, was incandescent with wrath. Even then already greatly, though rawly, talented at the arts of dreamweaving, Chandra fell upon Betamo and tore the dreams of power and lust straight from their heart, consuming them within himself and leaving Betamo alive, yet mindless. The grains of sand that had been Betamo’s deep indigo became Chandra’s orange flesh, and Betamo diminished into barely a dream of what they once were.

 The consequences for this were severe. Betamo would have recovered, of course, stars were always forming the dreams that make up themselves, but essential facets of their original personality might have been altered. 

The leader then took Chandra aside, and tipped his head to look into his fierce orange eyes, and begged him to tell the leader why he had harmed Betamo so, and fed from them in such a vicious manner.

 So Chandra did. He spoke, in a great rage, of his beloved brother, and how the others had called him simple and “dreamless”, an insult so vast to the culture of stars even the leader rocked back, shocked. But then, a frown crossed the leader’s face, and he spoke though gently, with great steel, 

“The most passionate of stars burn out the fastest, and I would not see a star so young be lost to the darkness.“ 

The leader was wise; he feared that Chandra’s fiery heart would lead him to succumb to Fear and become a living shadow sooner than any star should do. And so it was against Chandra’s most violently spoken wishes that he was enrolled in the pilot training program to learn how to control and exercise his great hunger safely among the plentiful dreams of humanfolk. 

 "I do not want dreams,” Chandra spat, “I want my brother. He is perfect to me. We need each other!“ 

It was at that point the star who had lain in darkness’ arms to dream of two young lights such as Chandra and Sandy stepped forward, and said, "He does not need you, but you are consumed with him." 

Hurt, Chandra refused to accept it; they did not understand. They were _brothers,_ closer than blood, closer than flesh. Hadn’t it been partly Chandra’s dreams from which Sandy had been formed? And who would protect Sandy if Chandra was not there to see his smile and make his games and race him to the deep pools where sand ran in swift, swirling patterns like water? The longer he thought, the more Chandra began to lose hope, because in each instance he could think of a replacement for himself. After all, wasn’t there Rayysha, a young star who shone bright and green and shared Sandy’s lightheartedness?

The leader gently encouraged this, knowing this pain that so undid Chandra was instrumental in forcing him to leave the planet and take up his duties, which would stabilise his already-shifting mind. 

His glow dark and his smile lost, Chandra could not bear to tell his brother of his imminent departure until the very eve of his leaving. In the time he had left, Chandra cherished every moment with his younger brother, who was ecstatic. Gentle, content Sandy accepted this increase in attentions gladly, but the news, less so.

 In tears, young Sandy ran after his brother, who turned back one last time to stroke his wild and unruly hair, to kiss his damp cheeks, and promise Sandy his eventual safe return. 

"Look for me,” he said quietly, “in the darkness when the light of your skin glows bright. I will be there, if you close your eyes." 

Then he was gone, vanished into the deep black skies to answer the wishes of a race alien to them. Sandy, try as he might, was not able to summon Chandra’s spirit to him and grew weary and discontent. No longer did the shine of the sand seem to brighten his day, no longer was it fun to race amid the shady pools and deep caverns when he had no race partner. 

His shine grew so weary and dull that it was only the supportive and continuous efforts of Rayysha, his young friend, that Sandy maintained the will to stay lit, for stars were not like humans in that they needed dreams to stay alive, and losing all dreams within themselves caused their glow to extinguish and their bodies lost to eternal darkness, rising as blind, hungry creatures known as _Fearlings._

At last, their minds were made up. Accompanied by his now dear friend Rayysha, Sandy followed his brother into pilot training, and cast aside his childhood on the shores of his home world.

Chandra, who was dubiously pleased at this, embraced his brother, and promised to be there at the moment of Sandy’s induction as a full pilot.

Barely a few scant days before the ceremony, Chandra, tasked with a difficult job to stabilise an erratic sun, was forced to break his promise as the sun went into supernova, taking the surrounding planets and Chandra’s ship with it.

Nothing was ever recovered from the site of the accident. There was only ash.


End file.
